During and after the second world war the Fourteenth Army in Burma became famous as the Forgotten Army, almost as famous for being forgotten as for its great victory. More truly forgotten, however, despite its great strategic achievement in keeping open the lifelines to the eastern empire, is the role of the Royal Navy in those warm and contested eastern waters.
Typically, the only events most of us hear of are the disastrous losses of Singapore and of the warships Prince of Wales and Repulse, the latter blamed on Winston Churchill. We read of ossified naval thinking in the 1930s, of inadequate preparation and procurement muddle, symptomatic of inevitable national decline and imperial overreach, and shake our heads and agree. It’s all the more cheering, therefore, to come across a book that not only challenges received opinion but convincingly refutes it.
Andrew Boyd, a former submariner and diplomat, now an academic, argues that historians have generally underestimated the importance of denying the vast Indian Ocean to the Axis powers.
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